Introduction (: 00:06

Welcome to the Better Than Bitter™ Divorce Podcast, where we flip the script on divorce and show you how to have a more amicable divorce resolution. I'm your host, Tania Leichliter a divorce coach, a certified life coach, and the mastermind behind the Better Than Bitter five-step game plan course, where I help individuals build a pathway towards a more amicable divorce resolution.

Each week, I'll bring you uplifting stories from people who've successfully experienced amicable separations, proving that divorce doesn't have to be a battleground. Whether you're overwhelmed with grief, struggling with custody and co-parenting, or just dealing with a high-conflict individual, this podcast is here to guide you towards reclaiming your life and being what I know is possible, better than bitter.

Tania Leichliter (: 01:45

Hi, and welcome to the Better Than Bitter™ Divorce podcast, episode number 10. Today we have Jeff Kolez Jeff is a resilience coach, a speaker, and the founder of Divorce Daddy, an initiative to help individuals navigate the emotional and practical challenges of divorce while rebuilding their lives with purpose and strength.

The reason why I've invited Jeff here today is because he actually had a toxic marriage and an even more difficult divorce. And when I heard that and I heard by, you know, what he is doing today, it just really proves that even if you are somebody that had a tumultuous divorce or a toxic marriage, that it isn't too late to figure out how to heal.

Cause he really found himself in this battle that he just wasn't prepared for. He didn't do the work before he started his legal divorce. He was slandered, he was alienated and he was stripped of everything he knew. So rather than succumbing to this defeat, Jeff embarked on this transformative journey. And in better than bitter, we try to get you to take this transformative journey before you step into your legal divorce.

because as he shows, it is still not too late if you haven't done the work pre-legal. But if you can do it pre-legal, there is a level of self-discovery and healing that can happen. And he really realized that he had a choice. He could remain a victim or he could take control and grow stronger. And Jeff, well, he chose the latter and he rebuilt his life from the ground up.

And so today, Jeff lives a purposeful life with deep meaning, and incredible relationships, especially with his children and his company, Divorce Daddy, where he helps others heal from the same type of divorce that he did. It is never too late to rebuild and thrive and believing that every setback is an opportunity for growth and empowerment. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff (: 03:56

Thanks for having me, Tania.

Tania Leichliter (: 03:58

Well, good. Well, that is such an introduction and I'm so excited that you're here today. So what I really wanted to talk about is this idea around healing from the inside out and the transformative journey that you took. And at what point did you just knock yourself upside the head and be like, what the hell am I doing? I, that life is better than this. I just got out of a toxic marriage. I don't need to continue.

to take this burden of resentment and bitterness into my next chapter. At what point, what was the turning point for you?

Jeff (: 04:35

I think there was a moment in the divorce process where it was like, what is going on? This isn't reality. is, like, life doesn't have, shouldn't be this hard. Why am I going through this process where...

Somebody's picking up my chips and putting and giving them to somebody else and you know taking a piece of everything I have and giving it to somebody else and the emotional pain and Strife it just like life shouldn't be that hard. It was just this I don't know that I think the specific moment was sitting in court just having this thought looking around like is this life And then

In the quiet moments afterward, I just remember sitting there and being angry and just thinking, is this going to be the rest of my life? What's happened in the past has happened. Can't control that. I don't know what's going to come next, so I can't worry about that too much, although both of those things are easier said than done.

you know, all I can focus on is who I am today, who I want to become tomorrow, and then work towards that. So it was really that decision in those quiet moments of who do I want to be?

Tania Leichliter (: 05:54

So at Better Than Bitter™, we always talk about manifesting your desired outcome. So part of the beginning stages of the divorce process, having clarity, having clarity around what is it that I really want here before you, and from a drone's eye view, not like, do I want the house or the car, or I want 50, 50 % of the kids, but taking a bigger bird's eye view and saying, okay, what is it that I really desire here?

What does my life look like, feel like? How do I want to have relationships with people that were part of my life in my married life? so tell me when you were sitting in that courtroom and it was all over and you talked about, okay, that shouldn't have been so difficult. And now I'm sitting with the results of that. Tell me about it, okay.

what's next? What's next? Because you said that like there was some maybe lack of clarity there.

Jeff (: 06:59

I think, so in the work I do, I don't believe that trouble starts in the divorce. I think it goes beyond, it goes, you know, we've got core wounds that go all the way back to childhood. So I didn't even know what I wanted. So that's why I couldn't envision what I wanted post-divorce. just knew I wanted this horrible thing to end. It was only after working with a coach that

I was able to start to piece together what I wanted. I'm still figuring that out to this day. So putting that together, it takes time and it takes...

clarity and Real reflection real inner reflection so going back to those core wounds That's what created this fog as I'm going through this I just knew I didn't want At first it starts. You don't want the stuff taken away You don't want your relationships taken away like your time with your kids and those were the two major battles But I felt like there was something below that

something much deeper in there that I was fighting against. for me as a father, how do I say this? When you have, when you get villainized, the attempt is to take away time with your kids. And when you take away time with your kids, it's like you're taking away your legacy.

And it's taking a like who you lose all sense of who you are and you're irrelevant and almost disposable so When I was going through that I realized I Didn't want to lose contact with my kids not just for myself, but also I play a Father plays a pretty deep role in their kids lives so

You know, I'll add all of that together and that became what was worth fighting for and that clarified what I wanted post-divorce.

Tania Leichliter (: 09:06

So it's interesting, I've had two guests on my podcast and we've talked about this idea of individuals that villainize or alienate their soon-to-be exes or exes from their children's lives. And in this world of trying to create a more amicable divorce, we talk about the importance of individuals that even though you have differences and maybe one person might have wronged the other one in their eyes,

But yet it is super important not to have the children understand that the other parent is bad. So never put the other one down, disparaging the other parent, because kids know that they're 50 % mom and they're 50 % dad. So if mom is saying dad is bad, then the child is saying, I must be 50 % bad.

And I've now had two guests on my podcast that have said that exact thing. So tell me how you were able to come out of the trenches. You said in your bio how you have a relationship with your kids. So obviously you went from villain being the villain or having that level of alienation to rebuilding a relationship with your children. So if you can tell me a little bit more about that process.

Jeff (: 10:24

I don't, my ex never disparaged me directly to my kids. It was everybody else around. So I want to make that clear. And I think we were able to both become better parents as a result of this. But it was, yeah, there was everybody else around, you know, heard about how awful I was.

In terms of the process of building with my kids, somebody gave me the advice that you should do.What is best parenting advice I ever got was to try putting your kids into everything, give them a shot with everything and, really put them into what they take a liking to like just go whole hog with it.

And when they were with me, we tried all kinds of stuff. Being Canadian, my kids both went into hockey. One took a real shine to it. The other one just kind of, you know, it was OK. So the one who really liked it, you know, pushed them as hard as he wanted to go.

And I don't mean push as in became a crazy hockey parent because that does happen in Canada, but I just mean He says he wants to make the next team the next year like the next level up so give him a push in that and My youngest is more of an art kid and So I put him more into art type stuff. He liked Improv

So in that process of challenging them in that way, we grew closer. It's really funny. You push your kids away a little bit and they come back to you. It's strange how that works. But that really built trust between me and them. And now I think I'm.

It's just not just me. think both sides of us are reaping the rewards of that. After I get off this call, I'm going to help my oldest set up his first investment account and we're going to buy his first stocks together. That's pretty cool. He's 18 years old and now we're going to buy him stocks and I'm going to show him what I've learned about stocks.

Tania Leichliter (: 12:16

Yeah, that's awesome.

Jeff (: 12:24

So the advice I'd give for building a good bond is to challenge your kids, push them away, just enough. You gotta get a sense of who they are, what they like, and as you push them, they'll come back to you, because they trust that you're pushing them into a safe direction.

Tania Leichliter (: 12:44

Yeah. So a lot of what you do, we talked about before, was this idea around healing from the inside out. So take me through kind of somebody comes to you, they've had a tumultuous divorce, they're down and out, like you said, stripped, feel villainized, you felt like you were at rock bottom. So take me through somebody who comes to you and they say, Jeff, I need to heal. So what is your...

Like, what is your process? How do you get people out of this place of despair?

Jeff (: 13:16

So the reason for the work I'm doing is I think, well, first of all, know, divorce is seen as one of the biggest failures in life. I think it's top five. Might even be the top three. can't quite remember, but it's up there in terms of one of the biggest failures. And I think...

We are here when we go through something tough like that. I think we're here because we have a calling And I don't think we grow into who we really should be Unless we go through big trauma So I the first thing I do is reframe what they've been through This is an opportunity. It's not you know, the end of your life. It's not the end of the world Give somebody

Suffering only happens when there's pain without meaning so if you can give meaning to that pain I think it really changes the perspective. So who do you want to become? What is your mission? Let's look at what your mission is in life and take your focus away from what you lost into what you're going to give so I have the idea that if you plant lots of flowers

There's no room for weeds to grow. So let's look at who you're going to become, and how you're going to recover from this. What are you going to turn this challenge into? A lot of the time, as you start building that new life, as you start planting those new flowers, challenges come up from the unhealed past. So for myself, I've had challenges around being seen.

which is a challenge when you're doing work like this and you're out talking on podcasts. It's very uncomfortable for someone like me who had that challenge. But I've got a few techniques around healing those wounds and then you are able to move forward and do that more often. So...

It's really about going back, challenging yourself, moving forward, and then looking backwards at what comes up, and then repeating that pattern until you, you know, gain momentum.

Tania Leichliter (: 15:32

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a great path toward healing, very much aligned with a lot of the work that we do at Better Than Bitter. And it sounds like what you do as a divorced daddy coach about really moving people through their fears versus around them or avoiding them, right? So it's about...

making sure you identify what is the emotion that you're feeling, figuring out what the core is, what the core fear is that's creating that emotion, and then allowing yourself to understand that it is not about the amount of waves that crash down on you, but it's your ability to ride those waves and transferring those, as you said, events into just making them an event. It is not something that defines you.

You said something about divorce being a failure. And one of the things that I definitely tell people is that, yeah, it is maybe a thought that you are a failure, but it is not a fact that you are a failure. You are only thinking when you get divorced that you have failed, but it is not a fact because divorce, at least from my perspective, is an opportunity for personal discovery.

and personal growth. And that if you continue to think that you have failed, then the result you are gonna get in your life is that you're gonna be a failure, you know, in your divorce. And so your thoughts are directly correlated to the results that you're getting. But as soon as you shift and re-script that thought of I'm a failure, and I mostly see that thinking in my male clients,

versus my female clients, because there is definitely kind of some weight, like societal pressure that has been based on like an older traditional, you know, man versus woman identity that says that, you know, a man has failed if he hasn't been the provider or the caretaker or et cetera. And also maybe just

You know, again, it's not foolproof because I had to have women clients that also feel like they have failed till death do us part is obviously a commitment that people take very seriously. And if it's anything under death do us part, you know, they feel like a failure, but it really is shifting the script. And so I really challenge people to rethink to say, like, are you really a failure? Like, really? Are you a failure? Can you celebrate all the amazing things that happen in your marriage? You have two children. Is that considered a failure?

No, that is a celebration. That's an amazing thing that you two did together. There might be points in your marriage where things weren't so warm and fuzzy, and that led to you not being together. But I challenge that idea of divorce as failure because it really does, it just doesn't allow for people to heal.

Jeff (: 18:31

I agree with you. I completely agree with you. I'm on your side. I'm talking about and I'm talking to the person who's in the moment. So they feel in the moment they feel like they're a failure. As I was going through divorce, I felt like a failure the whole time sitting in court. How the hell did I get here? I'm a failure. So that's what I'm speaking to. There is in any emotion.

Tania Leichliter (: 18:42

Yes, that makes sense.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff (: 18:56

There is a nugget inside of it. There is gold inside of that. There's wisdom there and deep deep wisdom and I agree. I don't want to jump to Trying to mine that wisdom until you've really felt that that depth Like go down to that depth. I've been so deep and dark and all of those places But if you keep mining that

Tania Leichliter (: 19:11

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jeff (: 19:20

the, there's, like I said, there's that, there's that, there's that gold. What I realized is that I had this fear of, I think I mentioned this earlier when we were talking of being irrelevant and disposable. And that's just deep, deep, deep.

almost, uh-oh, what's the word I'm looking for? It's, anyway, it's, it's a deep wound and healing that wound changes your life. changes your perspective, but you can't get there until you go to that place. So I think the first step is acknowledging what you're going through, what, what I'm feeling and don't, I think,

The reason I'm, personally still struggling to talk about this work is that I don't know necessarily how to speak to men about emotions at a marketing level, at a level here. think, I don't know that the conversation's ready to be had at such an overt level. being able to, I think,

When I was going through it anyway, and I know a lot of other men, we just want to wallpaper it over, wallpaper over that wing of the house and never speak of it again. But that's, you know, that's not realistic. And that's how you get into sitting on the couch and drinking your problems away. You're not taking action. So the work I'm trying to do is acknowledge that that exists. First of all, that's the very first step. I think you have to feel it. There's no way to avoid it.

And only once you do that are you able to start diving into that and finding what those gems are. You're not irrelevant. You're not disposable. Existential dread. That's what I was thinking of. This deep existential dread that you don't matter, you're here, and that your only purpose is as an ATM or every other weekend kind of dad. And what I'm trying to argue is you're not that. You're more than that. You have a deep inherent value by being a dad and being there for your kids.

Tania Leichliter (: 21:21

Yeah, I think that absolutely. I think that with fear, fear of being irrelevant, fear of being disposable, whenever there's a deep fear that you have like that, there's always some intent behind it. So what is the intent of that fear that I'm feeling? And you go deep with that. So is it a shame? Is it guilt? Is it like, what is my fear trying to tell me?

about me, because I'm having that fear because of, like you said, the nugget that sits behind it that then appears as Tara Brock would say, as an animal with a bunch of different heads means. So like overtly your fear is showing up as an emotion, whether you get angry, right? Or maybe you get anxious or, but those emotions.

come from a deeply rooted fear of something, right? And that fear is there with some intent. Because you think about our sympathetic and our parasympathetic nervous system, right? The fight, flight, or freeze, which is back here, our brain is overactive. It's going, so something comes at you, right? And then your brain starts to be like, high alert, high alert.

and your sympathetic nervous system starts to kick in, right? And that's because we are a survival of the fittest. the animals that survive, we're not the ones sitting on rocks like, you know, like, dude, peace out. You know, they're the ones that survived, the ones that were on high alert. And so fear is something that our nervous system is accustomed to, but if you can't give your brain that space.

to move into that prefrontal cortex, to give it that space to breathe, to relax, to create some mindfulness and awareness, like you said, around the emotion. How am I feeling it? Where am I feeling it? I need to name that. I have to sit with it, okay, and stop avoiding it and stop, you know, running circles around it over drinking, over smoking, over-spending, over sexting, whatever you're doing to avoid that deep vibration in your body.

And I think men and women alike, you know, I think that do both have the problems with sitting with those very, very deep, uncomfortable feelings, right? But until you do, you can't act to access your prefrontal cortex, the logical, the rational. And that's what moving into your divorce, your legal divorce, and you haven't been able to find a way to access that, it's only going to be tumultuous, right? If both people are acting in this rare

around reactivity, right? They're not going to be able to get to an amicable resolution or even anything that feels remotely good at the end of it, right? Like you said, like you still, you got finished with it. You couldn't wait to get out of that toxic marriage. You get out of the toxic marriage. You're like, why don't I feel any better? You know, it's like, Again, like you did the healing and you did the amazing stuff is you went deep. You dug deep. You're like, okay, what am I feeling? Where am I feeling it?

How does it feel in my body? Okay, and now I gotta sit with this. And what is its intent? Like, what is it trying to tell me? And that's the hardest thing, I think, for me, like getting that for people to really understand the intent of what's happening to their body and how they can use that to move forward with more courage and hope. So this has been great, Jeff. I know that we have...

We both have kind of just been having like a really awesome conversation about this because I do love, I don't talk to a ton of divorce coaches on this podcast, but I definitely felt that you were coming in from a different perspective from a, okay, I didn't do the pre-work and now I'm doing the post-work and now I want to help people. So can you tell everybody here a little bit more about your practice, who you serve and how you do your business? And again, for everybody who's listening, this will be in the show notes.

Jeff (: 25:22

Sure, so I'm available at divorce-daddy.com. The idea is to build an amazing life after a divorce so you've been through the process. What are you learning from it and how can I help guide you into a place where you're feeling more assertive and calm?

I think I'm a little more on the spiritual side of things, so more mindfulness and more feeling into the body where the emotion is and learning to tune into yourself.

Tania Leichliter (: 25:53

Great, well, I appreciate it. And for all of our listeners, we definitely will have all of Jeff's information at divorcedaddy.com. Is that correct?

Jeff (: 26:03

Unfortunately, somebody is sitting on Divorcedaddy.com. I'll have to get it for him.

Tania Leichliter (: 26:05

Okay, divorce-daddy. So now we've heard it twice, divorce-daddy.com. And great, I appreciate you being a guest today. It was really great to get to connect with you. And I'm so glad that you personally are feeling better and you're on the other side of all this because that's of course the most important thing is how you rebuild your life post-divorce.

Jeff (: 26:27

Well, I think you're doing great work in helping people not to experience what I experience. So keep it up. Thanks for having me.

Tania Leichliter (: 26:32

great. Well, thanks again for being a guest. All right.

Tania Leichliter (: 26:38

So I always end each podcast with three simple tips that I have pulled from each episode. So in this episode with Jeff, the first tip was about reframing. Reframe what you've been through. Rescripting. This is an opportunity, not the end of the world. Number two, suffering only happens when there is pain without meaning.

So understanding where your pain is coming from, and then you will not suffer. The third one is to look at who you want to become. What are you going to turn this challenge into? And start planting those flowers. So again, thank you so much for coming to listen to episode number 10 with Jeff, and I look forward to seeing you and having you be part of our community in episode number 11.

Tania Leichliter (: 27:33

Thanks for tuning in to Better Than Bitter, navigating an amicable divorce. Whether you are at the beginning of your divorce journey, midway through, or even done, we want the stories from our guests to give you hope that an amicable resolution is possible. If you'd like to dive deeper into today's episode, check out our show notes for a full transcript, reflections, and links to learn more about Better Than Bitter's coaching courses,

and how to connect with our fabulous guests. If you're ready for more support, you can head over to betterthanbitter.coach. Daily, you'll find details and additional information on our five-step game plan multimedia course, our one-to-one Zoom coaching, group coaching, monthly memberships, events and retreats, and a whole lot more. Plus, we've got a ton of free resources, like our monthly newsletter,

our private Facebook group, Instagram channel, and a library of articles and free webinars to help you along the way. When you go to our website, you'll be able to schedule a free 45-minute breakthrough call. Remember, we're here to help you reach an amicable resolution. Find your courage and believe in your brighter future because you know what? It is possible.

At Better Than Bitter™, we measure success by what we give and not by what we get. So let's change the divorce dialogue together. It's time to be better than bitter.